Speculations on Future Computations

Rudy Rucker
Emeritus Professor,
Computer Science, SJSU

Abstract

Any natural process can be regarded as a computation. I’ll say a bit about
this notion, and discuss some of the questions that it raises. And then I'll
talk about some areas in which we can expect to see nontraditional forms of
computation taking hold:

Quantum computation­--a deeper form of physical computation that can imbue
any object at all with AI.

Social computation--­getting an understanding of the hive mind.

Ultimately humanity may arrive at a future in which there are no manufactured
goods at all, and where universal telepathy replaces the internet.

About the Speaker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a former computer science
professor at San Jose State. He received two Philip K. Dick awards for his
cyberpunk novels. He recently published his autobiography, Nested Scrolls.
His talk will draw on the ideas in his nonfiction tome
The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul, and in science-fiction series
The Ware Tetralogy and in his novel Postsingular . You can read these books for
free online. More info at
www.rudyrucker.com.